As The Fog Clears

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

The last two weeks have been both enlightening and horrifying, and that enlightenment continued with last night’s pull-ups er big boy conference, so called.

Oh, not because I didn’t know the zombie was a zombie, shambling around and being directed by the extreme left. I knew that.

My mistake, though was one that us, old cold-warriors are prone to. You see, in our day commies might not have been any more competent than they are now (I maintain at least the western ones were still competent, while in the USSR they might be suffering from 4th generation communism, a virus that eats brains. (Not literally. And yes, I can explain.))but they sure appeared more competent. I don’t know how much of this was the effect of a complicit and fully in control of all information media. It might be impossible to ever know.

However, while I didn’t assume their plans would work in the long run, I assumed their plans were minimally competent. Like, not eating paste competent.

This was torpedoed by two things: letting the zombie get on that stage for the debate, and thinking it would work, somehow, at all. And all the hype beforehand, too, about how incisive and brilliant the zombie was.

And then the reaction on the left to the big boy pants conference. Not the conference, which was its own amazing disaster though perhaps, if I trust Stephen Green on it (Look, I’m not stupid enough to watch it, no) marginally less obviously presented by a zombie than the debate, no. The REACTION to it from the left.

It wasn’t their in one voice, trained-seal like clapping and telling us how cleveramazing Biden was. That’s… Look, they’re group oriented, they might even believe it. Because they believe whatever the group believes. Hillary’s slogan was almost right to define the left’s modus operandi, only it wasn’t “I’m with her” it’s always “I’m with them.” They believe that there’s safety and MORALITY in numbers that the greater number is always right and to an extent — remember, levitating the mint seemed rational to them — that reality is determined by consensus.

So once they realized they’re stuck with Biden, they would start seal-like barking how amazing he is, in the face of all sanity and evidence, because they hope this will shape not only opinion but REALITY.

But the stuff that leaked in around the corners is what was truly horrifying. I have a friend who is a mixed blessing because he insists on showing me things going up in Mastodon. For those who have forgotten, Mastodon is where the left ran for fear of free speech on twitter. So, while it’s absolutely horrifying, it’s also a good measure of things they just think make sense and are what everyone knows.

On Mastodon last night they were gloating about how what happened was that reporters thinking they were going to watch an explosion listened to a “well informed” and “brilliant” conference on Biden’s agenda, including foreign policy and domestic measures….

Oh, I saw some of those. Well informed and sensible, indeed. If your mind is full of Imagine, Give Peace a Chance, and the more ridiculous just so stories that the left loves to believe.

This is a world in which feeding the “starving” children of Gaza will miraculously bring peace about, instead of the money going to build more weapons and mount more attacks on Israel, while the children are taught it’s all the fault of the Jews and that killing more or them will bring about paradise.

But more importantly, this is a world, and a set of minds to which “National rent control” is a sensible solution.

And here’s the thing: the set of mind who believe this are the same set of minds that is manipulating Biden (self obviously) and who thinks these appearances and speeches will garner support.

Because polls notwithstanding (Don’t fully blame them there. They know they manipulate those, so they assume now we’re manipulating them, which, while in error is far more sensible than any of their other beliefs, because it merely rests in assuming everyone is like them.) they still assume what they propose is right and just, and what any sensible person will immediately perceive as right and just. They think the only thing they have to do is proclaim what they intend to do and most of all their wonderful intentions loud and clear, and everyone will of course see they’re just, sensible and wonderful and fall in.

Their opposition to them is two camps. One that is outright evil, and perhaps suborned (not very clear by whom, but they probably think “millionaires and billionaires” without realizing most of those are on their side.) The other are simply people who haven’t heard the Gospel of progressivism. Once they hear that loud enough, they’ll instantly convert and stop voting “against their interests” and there will be candy and unicorn farts for all.

The problem, the real problem, at the basis of it is that these are the children of Summer of Love by The Good People Lost. They are the third generation of leftover leftist hippies who refused to believe anything we saw during Reagan’s tenure. To them rent control still means rents are lower, and they never understood what we mean by “market distortion” nor processed the fact that most places with rent control are both hellish expensive and have decaying real estate. To them that’s just because landlords are greedy. To them minimum guaranteed income is just sensible, and the resulting inflation and lack of production are just a sign that rich people are greedy and capitalism is evil. To them government should control everything AND there should be no borders, because the experts should be in charge of everything worldwide. And if you, yes you, you stupid peasant, would just eat the bugs and live in walkable cities, Gaia wouldn’t be mad at us, and everything would be great.

Oh, and the USSR only fell because we are so evil we tricked “the good guys” into surrendering. And no, there wasn’t anything bad behind the curtain. Here, they have these pictures clipped from Soviet Life in the seventies to show you how beautiful and prosperous a planned economy can be. And if only everyone–

If you imagine this in the sniveling, high tones of a middle school girl in a snit, you’ll have the full picture.

These are the people who working behind the scenes at Hillary’s campaign not only thought that the pee story about Trump made sense, but also would cause the entire right to run screaming from Trump, because ‘ick, Russia’. You see, they never understood why the right in this country rejected communism. I mean, they told us it was wonderful. They explained. They explained in school and in movies, and on TV. So, the only reason we rejected it was, of course, because we’re evil. And mean. And hate Russia, for no good reason. So associating Trump with Russia would make us run. When it didn’t they suddenly assumed that’s because it was true, and Trump was working with Putin. NONE OF IT MAKES SENSE unless you assume that communism is absolutely wonderful, the USSR agit prop of the seventies was holy writ, and that if only they explain louder–

This is the Biden camp. That and a few ruthless people who are getting very rich and protecting their stash while assuming “Apres moi, le deluge.”

But the few manipulating Biden, the ones in charge, picked by Jill who, as various people have pointed out, is cunning and profoundly dumb?

They are commies, sure. But not the cunning commies of the cold war. No. These are 40 something theater kiddies, who have been doing all the right things according to what they were told is right.

Kiddies who were told that all the discomfirmation of their cultish upbringing in holy Marx was “disinformation” and “evil.” (And probably greedy and mean too.)

They BELIEVE. They incandescently believe in a bunch of shibboleths that make no sense whatsoever, but which they hold onto like a baby to his pacifier.

They believe if the US disarms, or turns its military into a cross between a charity organization and a force for disseminating sexual liberation propaganda, there will be PEACE.

They believe if price and wage controls go into place, everyone will be prosperous, and only “the rich” will suffer.

They believe you — yes, you — aren’t sufficiently taxed.

They believe in open borders, because it helps redress “colonialism”.

They believe in two spirit, and BIPOC and– THEY BELIEVE.

They believe so hard they figured no one would realize that Biden was a zombie, because look, he’s saying the Holy TRUTH and therefore good. And once everyone hears it, they will of course realize it’s true and perfect.

I have a headache. And I’m for real terrified. Because evil? Evil we can fight and maybe even defeat. But this is stupid. Willful stupid on steroids, and without bounds.

And stupid is dangerous.

In the short term, expect much much louder affirmations of what IS RIGHT AND JUST, including that Biden is an immortal genius.

In the long run, may G-d have mercy on the United States of America.

Because if we don’t take as much control as possible out of the hands of the fanatical stupid, the crash is going to be very hard and the rebuild painful, because what we’re doing is the equivalent of letting the toddlers bang on everything with a hammer. And that breaks things. And some of those things are things we’ll need.

Evil has revealed itself. And it’s well-meaning. And profoundly stupid.

UPDATE ONCE MORE I FORGOT TO POST THE FUNDRAISER BECAUSE I’M AN IDIOT.

*Because these are my two weeks of fundraising, I’m obligated to add the following:
This blog is reader funded. I don’t have a grant or a patron. You’re my patrons and only you can compensate for the toil of keeping the blog going day after day, year after year. For the full explanation of why a funding drive, and what I intend to use it for, if you’re interested, go here.

There are several ways of supporting me.
GiveSendGo, for which I make no promises meaning I’m not giving you anything for your contribution; Chapterhouse, for which I will give you my fiction that is in process and yes there will be typos, backtracking, characters who change names suddenly and other mishaps; and Patreon, for which I give you cat pspsps posts. For the more exotic ways to donate: email me for paypal address. The book promo email will do for that: bookpimping at outlook dot com. And there is the snail mail address at: Sarah A. Hoyt, 304 S Jones Blvd #6771, Las Vegas, NV  89107.
I know times are tough — for all of us — and I don’t hold it against anyone who can’t contribute. But all contributions are greatly appreciated. – SAH*

156 thoughts on “As The Fog Clears”

  1. I’ve said before, I am convinced that the 2020 Cats movie was the left wishcasting how they were going to replace Trump with Hillary through the power of wistful thinking.

    Liked by 1 person

      2. I’m happy to have missed that movie. Saw the touring company version in Cali mumble years ago, and the community theater edition about 10 years back, but what little I read about that movie gave me the creeps.

        Was McCavity supposed to be a Trumpian figure in the movie? Asking for a friend. :)

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        1. I just read the Wiki summary. The plot! It burns! I rather liked Andrew Lloyd Webber’s reaction (he adopted a dog in reaction to it…)

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  3. It’s a religious cult, which is one reason they are so sympathetic to the Jihadists; they have very similar mindsets, its just they believe in different deities; that and of course their mutual hatred of Jews.

    They are too stupid to actually win in the long term, but they can and will do a lot of a damage, particularly as they destroy infrastructure, particularly energy generation infrastructure, that will take decades to rebuild, as they push the Green Leap Forward. They think Mao, Stalin, and the rest of the 20th century totalitarians are models to be emulated and it is holy writ to them that the wrong side won the cold war, while also believing that doing so is “democracy”.

    Their arrogance is even greater than their stupidity and to the point they believe themselves to be living gods walking the Earth. Even if the don’t themselves think of it in those exact terms, that is the essence of their attitude.

    The scary part is no matter how many people see Biden as the zombie and puppet he is, the Democrats may very will be able to manipulate vote totals in key states and districts to install his moving corpse back into the White House and hand him both the House and the Senate; at which time they pack the Supreme Court and effectively bring an end to the constitutional republic, while aggressively trying to strip people of fundamental constitutionally guaranteed rights to the point where violent civil strife will be almost certain. (It seems to me a lot of the time that they want civil strife/war because they are delusional enough to think they will win and grab the absolute power they so desire).

    Again, they are wrong, but their stupidity and arrogance will cause a lot of damage along the way.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. If there is anything I’ve seen which illustrates their stupidity and/or ignorance more effectively than “Queers for Palestine” I can’t think of it. Their disconnect from reality has become nearly total.

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  4. “If you imagine this in the sniveling, high tones of a middle school girl in a snit, you’ll have the full picture.”

    Don’t even have to imagine it — just go find any clip of AOC in the vicinity of a camera and a microphone.

    Liked by 1 person

  5.  because ‘ick, Russia’. 

    Or because “ick, kinky.” Because they think we’re all eager to put cameras in the bedroom and have the Inquisition SWAT team on standby.

    I couldn’t care less what you do in there, as long as it’s all consenting adults and no one is picking my pocket to cover the costs of the wages of “sin”. Any of them.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. And they believe that we’re all scared of sex. Quite a while back, someone photoshopped Michelle Malkin’s head onto the body of a woman wearing a bikini. That was it. The original woman was only posing for the camera. She wasn’t doing anything. But we were all supposed to immediately disavow Malkin because of this photo.

      (ignoring the fact that the woman in the photo was clearly too tall to be the diminutive Malkin)

      Liked by 2 people

      1. Then there was AOC(?) who said that Republican Men hate her because “they want to have sex with me but can’t have sex with me”. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

        Liked by 1 person

              1. The above pretty much covers it; “You want me to WHAT?!? Oh, HELL no! Not even with a tied-on bag!”.

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      2. I remember that. They said “See Ms high and mighty is a total slut!” Um because she’s wearing a bikini? Not to mention the whole fake “AOC dancing video controversy” no one cared about that video. No one. Even freaking Newsweek realized the controversy was totally made up.

        Liked by 1 person

      3. I remember that. They said “See Ms high and mighty is a total slut!” Um because she’s wearing a bikini? Not to mention the whole fake “AOC dancing video controversy” no one cared about that video. No one. Even freaking Newsweek realized the controversy was totally made up.

        Liked by 1 person

      4. I remember that. They said “See Ms high and mighty is a total slut!” Um because she’s wearing a bikini? Not to mention the whole fake “AOC dancing video controversy” no one cared about that video. No one. Even freaking Newsweek realized the controversy was totally made up.

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      5. If you want to get a lot of hilarity on a Catholic blog, turn the topic to the way Catholics are really, really, really hung up about sex — and have lots of children. Works best if the commentariat has people with lots of children.

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      7. My second favorite joke about Baptists:

        Why don’t Baptists make love standing up?

        They fear someone will see, and think that they’re dancing.

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  6. A sufficient magnatude of stupidity is indistinguishable from evil. They can both be fought in similar ways. If incorrigible, the same response is required for either.

    Denying reality won’t help.

    Being squeamish won’t help.

    Coddling stupidity, like coddling evil, is to facilitate it.

    Liked by 1 person

  7. WPDEWTF? Your last 2 posts got stuck together.

    And no, I don’t think they’re well-meaning. They hate everything that is not them. Hence the agitation for genocide of Jews. Death Panels, as soon as they can implement them. Unrestricted abortion presented as ‘feminism’. Trans insanity. Need I go on?

    Liked by 2 people

        1. When I get the New! Improved! comment block, it decides that deleting a paragraph must be done while holding a crow’s feather in the right hand, a rabbit’s foot in the left, and the mouse in the gripping hand. All while turning widdershins and singing “Memory”.

          WPDE, but Peter Grant seems to be running into some Blogger issues that make WP look attractive.

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          1. They’re probably in the process of converting everything to “AI” (which it isn’t, and never was).

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    2. Oh, they’re on it. DEI medical schools will populate the prospiracy.

      https://twitchy.com/amy-curtis/2024/03/02/shapiro-dei-ucla-med-school-n2393517

      A few days ago, we told you about Ben Shapiro and his excellent work exposing the dangers of DEI in healthcare, specifically at Wake Forest and UPenn, and Duke. It was so damning that Duke scrubbed DEI videos from their website.

      Now he’s back, this time with UCLA’s medical school and their DEI programing: blatantly racist ideologies and policies that will harm patients, destroy the credibility of the medical field, and cost lives.

      Oh, and this is not “bad info”. It’s just info that throws the choices into stark relief.

      Liked by 1 person

      2. I saw something earlier today (not sure where–it’s that glut) where the wokistas are absolutely, positively, completely sure that Tractor Supply abandoning DIE/LGBTBBQ- is a horrible risk. I’m sure any purple haired farmers might get upset, but in the wilds of Flyover County, I haven’t seen any. (OTOH, I stay far away from any pot “farms”.)

        Oh joy. Got a message from Pac Power about a wildfire at the intersection of a fire trail and a major power line. With luck, they will get it under control (good access and decent terrain, for once). Without luck, Scheisse!

        Liked by 2 people

    3. Unrestricted abortion not just as feminism, but as a rite of passage. You’re not a woman until you’ve had your first abortion.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. To the point where one “trans-female” wanted to have a womb implanted into “her” so “she” could have a baby to abort.

        Liked by 1 person

          1. I don’t think it’s possible either, but IMO it was more a comment on the type of person “she” was.

            Liked by 1 person

          2. That person clearly understood that it was a fantasy. OTOH, wanted to be the first “transwoman” to have an abortion.

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      2. Which makes the, “If men could get pregnant abortion would be a sacrament,” claim exceptionally ironic (and obnoxious).

        Liked by 1 person

          1. :dryly: Oh, gads, believe me, short circuiting the competitive spirit is a major part of functional pregnancy support.

            The “it was worse for me” gets going hard.

            Liked by 1 person

              1. My mom’s been known to scowl and growl that great, they didn’t need/use pain killers. There’s no medals. My brother beat the doctor to the room. The point is to get the baby here safe.

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            2. There are limits though, with cultural context – one trip to Hawaii I was describing a friends new baby at 8lb 7oz to the diminutive young hapa ladies working in the aloha shirt shop, and the look of horror on their faces at the thought of delivering a baby that large…

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            1. If it hasn’t already been done, somebody needs to do this as an adaptation of the ‘Four Yorkshiremen’ sketch.

              ‘You had it easy. I gave birth in a shoebox in the middle of the road!’

              Liked by 1 person

              1. “You ‘ad a shoebox? All we ‘ad was a matchbox, and we was lucky to ‘ave it!”

                “You ‘ad a matchbox?” … And so it goes.

                Liked by 1 person

              2. Speaking of the Four Yorkshiremen, the non-profit I work for (that mainly does linguistics) has a yearly conference where we meet our colleagues from other parts of the globe (not all of whom can come every time, but so it goes) and discuss the challenges we face in our various locations. One tradition is the yearly skit night; and one year, four of our more senior members did The Four Linguists From Yorkshire.

                I don’t remember all of it, but it ended up with “Well, the language I’m researching is spoken in just one village, and to get there you have to take the bus to the city, then a motorcycle taxi to the next village, then a donkey ride up the mountain.” “Oh yeah? Well, the language I’m researching only has half a dozen native speakers, and they live all over the world so you can’t get two of them in the room at the same time.” “Oh yeah? Well, the language I’m researching has only one remaining native speaker, and HE’S MUTE!”

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                1. I’m flashing on the third-hand description of BIL’s business trip to a job site well above the Arctic Circle. Multiple airplane flights, each plane smaller and flight bumpier than the previous, followed by the obligatory helicopter ride.

                  Curiously, he doesn’t hate flying, though word is No Helicopters.

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                  1. Wise decision; helicopters don’t actually fly. They’re just so ugly that the Earth rejects them.😉

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          3. I agree, it would be largest healthy baby, or most babies or both.

            When I took my master gardeners class the to male students, were very focused on on largest vegetables/flowers or most perfect green lawn.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. Most babies in the shortest amount of time, in the most ridiculous way possible.

              “Full-term triplets at 8 months!”

              Liked by 1 person

            1. If men had to give birth I’d give humanity one generation max, before we go extinct due to pre-coital headaches.

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  8. A loyal leftist wrote a whole book about their problem winning hearts and souls- What’s the Matter with Kansas?. They truly don’t understand that people, for the most part, do know what’s in their best interests.

    And them, there’s something that puzzles me greatly. Why would any person of Jewish descent, secular or religious, vote today for any DemoncRAT at any level of government? The party has, as a matter of fact, regardless of what’s in their platform, sided wholeheartedly with groups that have pledged to Kill The Jews! All of them. Not caring if they’ve never set foot in a temple. And not coincidentally, that same group has pledged to kill all Americans. To overthrow all western governments and establish sharia as The Law. So- as a follow up, since survival is the strongest self interest- why would any American vote for a DemoncRAT at any level of government?

    Truly puzzling questions. AWFLs won’t vote for Republicans at any level because they might vote against the Rite of Abortion at any time during a pregnancy, and they’re granddaughter might be forced to have an unwanted child. But they support the party that supports the people that would turn their granddaughter into a sex slave since she’s not of their political movement masquerading as a religion…

    Liked by 1 person

    1. It’s kind of like Jewish folks who are all for civilian disarmament because…you can always trust the government? Seriously?

      There’s a basic aversion-of-eyes-from-history in which that is wrapped up that is just totally amazing to me.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. And then they will stand up and proclaim “Never Again!” loudly while simultaneously being Jewish in name only (culturally, not religious), and supporting Gaza over Israel.

        Because It Can’t Happen Here, y’see.

        Liked by 2 people

      2. They seem to make several faulty assumptions. First: “Nazis were right-wing. Nazis were antisemitic. Therefore, anyone labeled “right-wing,” is an antisemite.”

        Second, “Christians hate us. Conservatives are mostly Christians. Therefore Conservatives are antisemites.”

        And finally, they’ve bought the whole, “conservatives are capitalists, therefore they lack compassion and charity. Progressives care deeply about social justice, as do we. Therefore, we will, always side with progressives,” reasoning.

        Liked by 2 people

        1. I’ve talked to people whose only grasp of economics was literally “Socialism means being kind and generous, so liking Capitialism must mean you mean and greedy.”

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      3. I think some of them intend to BE the ones that send the men with guns to get people this time around. Or at least, they think the men with guns will stay under control and do only what they’re told. Most are probably just in denial or distracted by the shiny leftist slogans.

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        1. Leftists seem to have forgotten the law of unintended consequences, dropping all thought to second order effects. Some of the more progressive managed to disregard first order effects.

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    2. What’s the Matter With Kansas? is emblematic of the most condescending BS possible. The idea that someone else knows what your “best interests” are. Arrgh. And they don’t even recognize how that’s condescending.

      Liked by 2 people

        1. They also don’t recognize how their policies are racist and sexist. Couldn’t possibly be, because they are by definition the “good guys.”

          Liked by 2 people

            1. Reminds me of Samuel Delany’s _Babel 17_ which postulates that, if you can just word it properly, a note left on a General’s desk can end a war. A leftist notion can be spotted by three earmarks: It will be founded in ignorance, focussed on irrelevance, and engaged in wishful thinking.

              Liked by 1 person

              2. A properly-worded note ending a war is, at least, within the realm of feasibility. And is not exclusive to the left. LOTS of people bought into Korzybski’s General Semantics in the 20th century, and if you tone down the conclusions, they’re not even that outlandish.

                Heinlein alluded to it in multiple stories, including “If This Goes On—“, where a character says something to another, makes him angry, then explains that all he did was say that he was related to his own mother. Annoyingly, RAH didn’t actually spell out how that was initially phrased, but the basic idea of how language can work is not wrong.

                When Korzybski said “the map is not the territory”, he was right. The mistake, which is as old as shamans and witch doctors, is thinking that altering the map will change the territory.

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          1. No, “false consciousness” is the magical phrase that lets leftists tell people they don’t know what’s good for them, only the leftists do. If a black is conservative, he has false consciousness.

            And yes, they really believe this. And have. For decades, at least.

            Liked by 1 person

                1. They are as convinced we are overflowing kybos as we are of them.

                  You can boggle some of them. “Since you have arbitrarily decided to tag me ‘full of shit’ before we even began this discussion, why are you even bothering to try to discuss the matter?” (insert leftroid blather) “Well, -I- hadn’t tagged you as poo-plentiful until you went and proved it, so there is that in my favor.”

                  The look of helpless boggle was… uplifting.

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                  1. It’s simpler to just look at them disbelievingly, then walk away laughing hysterically while shaking your head. :twisted:

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                1. Except that they should still call themselves feminists without asking what the term means.

                  Ask what it means in a conversation about why women don’t call themselves feminists and they will waffle incredibly.

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              3. The fact that the left keeps having to discount what their opposition actually thinks and says, is a bad sign for the soundness of their positions. And they are now too young and ignorant to understand why that is.

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      2. Actually comment chain I saw — though there were others interspaced to make it not so clear:

        Leftist 1: Why did women vote against this candidate and their own best interest?

        Woman: Actually, after due consideration, I decided the other guy was in my best interest.

        Leftist 2: You’re selfish.

        Liked by 2 people

  9. The Biden Campaign has announced its new campaign song! People are excited for it!!!

    Isn’t it sad that coked-out Charlie Sheen was more coherent than our present FICUS?

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  10. “Stupidity cannot be cured with money, or through education, or by legislation. Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can’t help being stupid. But stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death, there is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity. “

    — Lazarus Long

    Liked by 2 people

      1. Which, as in economics, only postpones the correction applied by reality. And increases its magnitude. But sooner or later “The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!”

        Liked by 1 person

    2. Heinlein was off the rails on that one. I think he made the common error of thinking stupidity is the absence of intelligence. No, stupidity is the failure to apply intelligence.

      Some people – a small minority – act stupidly because they haven’t got enough intelligence to apply. A far greater number (all humans everywhere on occasion, and some people with great regularity) simply fail to use their brains in particular situations, either because they think the situation is simple and doesn’t require mental effort, or because they are lazy and don’t want to make the effort. (Sometimes both. And sometimes, to be fair, because nobody can make the intellectual effort required to deal with every situation intelligently. Sometimes we just get tired, and sometimes we spread ourselves too thin.)

      As Elbert Hubbard said: ‘Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day; wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit.’

      Natural lack of intelligence, it’s true, can’t be cured by money, education, or legislation. But a sound education can train any person with a reasonably normal brain to develop and use his intelligence, just as proper exercise develops muscles. And without that sound education, no one is capable of using his intelligence effectively. Like any complex tool, it requires skill to operate it.

      Now, given Hubbard’s dictum (and I think he was erring on the side of optimism), why is it that more people don’t die of their daily five minutes of stupid? Mostly, it’s because we trust other people to do the thinking in situations beyond our range of competency, and follow where they lead. In a society formed by tradition, this trust is placed in the accumulated knowledge of past generations, stored up in the form of custom.

      But tradition and custom alter slowly and can’t keep up with a rapid succession of novel circumstances. So we rely instead on institutions to save us the infinite trouble of thinking everything out for ourselves; and the institutions have been corrupted. Instead of trying to help us, they too often try to keep us helpless, thereby increasing their own power. The very people we rely on to guide our intelligence are determined to keep us stupid. Worse yet, since these same guides were taught by the same corrupted institutions, most of them could not help us if they tried.

      Stupidity is the intellectual version of entropy. It takes constant effort to resist it; and if it is not resisted, well, the heat-death of a society comes a hell of a lot faster than the heat-death of the universe.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. I’ve thought that too, for a long time. I even made up:

        The 3 Laws Of Stupidynamics

        1. The sum of intelligence and stupidity in a closed system is constant.
        2. In any interaction between intelligence and stupidity in a closed system, the overall stupidity will increase.
        3. A closed system will eventually approach a state of Absolute Stupidity in which no useful interactions are possible.

        Leftroids have isolated themselves in a closed system…

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  11. We are past the tip point where this can be turned around. No matter who get elected this fall neither side in Congress will stop spending. The president can’t make them. Plan on a crash. All the other issues won’t mean anything if you can’t feed and shelter your families.

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    2. Great Britain came out of the Napoleonic Wars flat broke and crippled by debt, and neither side in Parliament would stop the spending. But there was no crash, except for the short-lived panic of 1819 (from which Marx took all his statistics on the ‘immiseration’ that he held to be the inevitable product of a market economy).

      At one point, the Bank of England came within minutes of having to suspend payment and close its doors – which would have brought down the entire European financial system. At the last moment, someone found a bag of worn-out gold sovereigns in the cellar, tagged to be returned to the mint and made into new coins. These old coins were brought up and put back in circulation, and the bank survived the crisis until stronger measures could be taken to relieve it.

      In the aftermath of the panic, the British government cut all spending to the bone out of pure necessity. Result: the first modern boom economy, followed by almost a century of rapid material progress – the golden age of laissez-faire capitalism.

      Prepare for a few very tough years, but be ready for huge opportunities afterwards. Plants always grow best after a forest fire has cleared away the dead wood.

      Liked by 2 people

      2. “the golden age of laissez-faire capitalism.

        Prepare for a few very tough years, but be ready for huge opportunities afterwards. Plants always grow best after a forest fire has cleared away the dead wood.”

        …

        100% How many market crashes have we seen in the last 45+ years? Not counting the more local ones like timber crashing thanks to a little bird and a certain mountain? Heck hubby doubled down and kept buying it as it was dropping, when IBM stock tanked. I think he started getting called away from most of it when we were making profit $200+/share. That happens when it splits a bunch of times between purchase and selling. That doesn’t count the times he sold covered calls and the stock wasn’t called away. Same with IP (after we got control of the shares). IP never split like IBM but at $5/share dividend (eventually dropped to $1/share). But guarantied $800 – $4000/year + call sells. Of coarse back then we had time to wait. Little harder now. Hubby hits minimum distribution requirements for 2025.

        Liked by 1 person

  13. Mastodon was originally a response to pre-Musk Twitter and its censorship. The idea was to create a “federated” system where there would be no One Thing To Censor Them All. Then when Musk bought Twitter, various leftoids fled to Mastodon to escape the “right wing persecution”[1] and set up various bubbles there. The older Mastodon inhabitants (of which I was one) looked askance at this, but the dratted leftoids had to go *somewhere*. So now Mastodon has multiple pools of concentrated leftoid ugly.

    [1] “right wing persecution” in the sense of “religious persecution” as one character described it in Lest Darkness Fall (by DeCamp)

    “You don’t like the Goths?”
    “No! Not with the persecution we have to put up with!”
    “Persecution?”
    “Religious persecution. We won’t stand for it forever.”
    “I thought the Goths let everybody worship as they pleased.”
    “That’s just it! We Orthodox are forced to stand around and watch Arians and Monophysites and Nestorians and Jews going about their business unmolested, as if they owned the country. If that isn’t persecution, I’d like to know what is!”

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Yeah, Mastodon (and the fediverse in general), is designed to be functionally more free than anything centralized. The leftist instances of Mastodon hilariously suffered massive cognitive dissonance when Gab joined the fediverse, and blocked en masse. Interestingly, they haven’t done the same to Minds, which updated to the ActivityPub standard of the fediverse some time ago, too.

      It has been fascinating (and at times, rather disappointing) to see various people devoted to free speech for everybody suddenly shift to “wait, no, not those assholes!”

      Liked by 1 person

      1. When people are willing to split the free-speech baby in two, it’s a sign that it wasn’t their baby in the first place.

        OTOH, everyone does have limits, and my chief limit is that freedom of speech does not create a duty to listen. I’m old enough to remember the old leftist line “If you don’t like it, you don’t have to look/listen.” Which is reasonable exactly to the extent that not looking or listening is a reasonable option.

        Which means in practice that any public or semi-public forum will have to have messy, imperfect compromises about what is and isn’t allowed. But for private communications between the proverbial consenting adults I’m willing to go to extremes about what ought to be tolerated.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Oh, surely, blocking obnoxious people is fine for me, I do it all the time. It’s when a platform devoted to free speech does it that I have a problem. And despite the left’s past declarations of devotion to free speech, they are all too willing to eject the out group from all society, hopefully to starve when their banks refuse to give them their money.

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        2. ‘When people are willing to split the free-speech baby in two, it’s a sign that it wasn’t their baby in the first place.’

          Magnificent!

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    2. Depended on the regional Goths. North Africa had some really bad religious persecution of non-Arians, and so did Spain (Goths were Arian); but Italy was quite a bit better.

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      1. North Africa was the Vandals.

        The Vandals made themselves massively unpopular with the non-Arian populace. When the Byzantines invaded they were hailed as liberators, and the Vandal kingdom was destroyed in a campaign that lasted only four months.

        It was probably this easy victory that made Justinian think Italy would be easy to reconquer, so he sent in a sadly inadequate force to do the job. That campaign took eighteen years and ruined the country for centuries.

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  15. Leftists always sound like the Bandar-log in Kiplings Jungke Book:

    “We are great. We are free. We are wonderful. We are the most wonderful people in all the jungle! We all say so, and so it must be true.”

    Liked by 1 person

      1. Yeah, but they didn’t bring it to the silver screen…..

        Like I said, I wouldn’t care if they weren’t demanding I do so.

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        1. [sigh] I saw a still from this movie, with (the actor playing) young Abraham Lincoln in bed with another man. He had a full beard.

          Lincoln never grew a beard until after he had been elected President.

          I’m sure the rest of their historical research is at the same high level.

          Republica restituendae, et, Hamas delenda est.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. That may be more, “Let’s make sure they know he’s Lincoln,” than complete ignorance. But that isn’t much better.

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            1. Let’s face it (ahem), young Abraham had, um, interesting bone structure. Might be hard to duplicate in an actor.

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            2. Re: “Let’s make sure they know he’s Lincoln”: Ah, but was he wearing a stovepipe hat? That’s the real giveaway! 😉😜😜

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  19. BTW, if you want to watch a half-decent show with an intelligent villain, I recc’ “Queen of Swords”. (From about 1999, currently available free on Amazon.) Montoya is a intelligent, charming, deliberate villain. Who is actually very, very good at his job when he’s not scheming how to get more money and control over everything.

    You look at that guy, and at our current progressives, and you just want to facepalm. Because yes. The stupid is scary. Montoya is smart enough not to shoot himself in the foot just because he’s aiming at an enemy. Our idiots? Would likely explode a whole building with themselves in it to get “right-wing fanatics”, trusting in Duck and Cover to save them. Sigh.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. :mumbles as goes fishing through past posts: You had to remind me of this old piece: https://carolinefurlong.wordpress.com/2020/07/31/reflections-on-the-modern-view-of-villains/. “Every villain is the hero of his own story!” No, every villain is the protagonist of his own story, and you do not need a villain with a sob backstory to make him competent, deadly, and someone who can make the heroes go “Oh, crud, we are in the soup!”

      These types of villains are called “unrealistic” by the same people running this clown show. They might want to look in a mirror. Twenty years from now, people will say, “No villain in real life would do that!” and we will have to dredge up videos and news clippings to prove that yes, yes they can, would, and did do that. :sigh:

      Liked by 2 people

      2. Villains are much more prone to think of themselves as the clever ones, and others as suckers.

        When, in fact, they think of it at all. Theodore Dalrymple’s Life At The Bottom is good. Most simply don’t think of their own conduct by the same standard as everyone else’s.

        Liked by 1 person

    2. Found it on Youtube. Watched the first minute of the first episode and said, “It’s Zorro as a woman.” Looked it up on TV Tropes. One entry said “If your first reaction wasn’t “This is a distaff counterpart / gender-flipped Zorro,” then you probably don’t even know who Zorro is.” *grin*

      These days, I tend to drop a show at the first red flag because there’s so much bad writing out there. And “gender-flipped version of famous character” tends to be a red flag for bad writing for me, because it so often means the writers didn’t have original ideas so they were trying to piggyback off of someone else’s fame. But since this was made about twenty-five years ago, and it’s being recommended by someone I know is a good writer (did I ever tell you that my wife and I both found Embers to be better-written than the actual canon show? And given the quality of the writing on A:tlA (most of the time, anyway *cough* Great Divide *cough*), that’s NOT damning with faint praise), I’ll give it a real shot. Sometime, anyway; I’m still working my way through many, many other shows. (Having multiple kids under age 8 makes it difficult to have a spare hour to watch something).

      Oh, and it just occurred to me: they might be piggybacking off the concept of Zorro… but Zorro was piggybacking off the Scarlet Pimpernel, and probably others that I’m not familiar enough with to quote. But they did not steal the name. This is not a case of Supergirl or Batwoman or female Thor. (Seriously, Marvel writers, if Jane Foster picks up Mjolnir and receives the power of Thor, that does not mean she should be called by the name of Thor. Sheesh.) So I might be a little TOO sensitive on seeing a red flag right away; and as I said, it was twenty-five years ago so I’ll give it a shot.

      Liked by 3 people

      1. Yep. Cap picking up Mjolnir didn’t change his name (and Thor’s cry of, “I knew it!” when he does, was one of the best points in Endgame ).

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Cap’s picked up the hammer twice in the comics and not changed his name. Beta Ray Bill in the comics picked up the hammer and kept his name. Why the heck Jane Foster has to go by “Thor” – well, that’s a rhetorical question, isn’t it?

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  20. Watching that train wreck of a performance last night was bad enough. What really depressed me was the horde of Twitter idiots (not all on the left) who declared that Slow Joe had done “well enough” to not end his campaign. As if the world is safe enough that we can afford to keep a senile, doddering old man as Chief Executive.

    I started wishing CERN would fire up the LHC already, in the hopes that the quantum effects might get us out of this clown world.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. But he did do well enough. He did just well enough to keep just enough true believers clinging to their fantasies, so he can only be forced aside, and then it’s President and candidate Kamala.

      It may well be dangerous, but to say that he didn’t do well enough to cling to power for a few more months/weeks/days is asinine, since, well, he’s still there. For now.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Obviously he will continue in power for a little while. That his performance is considered acceptable I think is an indictment of the times we live in. As a nation, we used to have higher standards for what was needed of a President.

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      2. Yeah, Biden wasn’t sundowning in the presser like he did in the debate, so he could demonstrate he knew what he was talking about last night. Not that his initiatives will work, but he knows what they are.

        That’s the way dementia often works. It was one of his “good days”. It took us a while to recognize our Mother’s dementia because when we called her she sounded normal. But the police from her small town called us after she twice got lost driving home on very familiar routes. And when we got her into assisted living nearby we saw the sundowning happen. I recognized the pattern watching Biden at the debate.

        His fraudulancy’s bad days are going to get more frequent. But he’s stubborn (and dementia often amplifies stubborness) so he won’t step aside.

        Thus we have a good chance of improving things in this years elections. But we need to get out enough voters to beat the margin of fraud. There’s been enough work on reversing the Covid voting rules and cleaning up voting rolls & procedures to make that margin lower but it’s still an issue if voters are apathetic. You can’t win if you don’t play.

        Liked by 1 person

  21. I’m so reminded of “If This Goes On…,” just in one line in about the middle third about how the Cabal can stage and win the battles of the revolution, but lose the war to the Temple because most of the people believe in the faith.

    Most of the people around here are believers in the Church of Woke. They live marinated in the Faith, that Trump is an Evil Bad Orange Man (despite all evidence to the contrary), they maintain the quantum superposition that Biden can be President because he’s still fit, but he clearly has issues and it’s a good thing that he has help and will continue to have help in his next term. That an open border is a good thing. That punishing criminals who engage in shoplifting and theft is racist and horrible. That…

    It’s just frustrating to see this side, then see far too many on the other side that make the Birchers look sane in comparison. That make Alex Jones look like a voice of reason.

    It’s that needle that I’m trying to thread, as much as I can.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. That make Alex Jones look like a voice of reason.

      I hate to break it to you, but in spite of everything, it turns out Alex Jones *is* a voice of reason. A blustery, performative one, sure. But he’s been largely correct.

      And you can tell because the charges he was railroaded on (and don’t tell me it wasn’t a railroading, since he was declared guilty before trial by the judge, and was not permitted to mount a defense of any kind, to the point that when he was on the stand, he kept having to ask the judge if he was allowed to answer) were based on a few minutes of his radio show, out of decades of several hours a day broadcasting.

      Even focusing on a bad moment or three, they still had to rig the entire thing against him. If he was so far wrong, so much of the time, they could have made it look more legitimate.

      Believe me, me from five years ago would be just as shocked as you are.

      Liked by 2 people

        1. I mean, there’s an argument that Paul Reubens, in creating that character and doing him as a performance art piece for most of a decade, achieved something unique and great. Not sure how I can spin that into being the greatest intellectual of the time, especially with Thomas Sowell being around, among others, but…

          (And if you want to talk commitment: Reubens provided the voice of the space ship in Flight of the Navigator but, because he was “being” Pee Wee at that time, only took screen credit under a separate stage name.)

          Liked by 1 person

  22. With respect to the commies of the misbegotten USSR, they *were* more competent. They rose in the ranks by having their rivals killed or gulagged. That required a basic level of competence and a finely tuned sense for betrayal.

    Fauci would likely have done well.
    Biden might have coasted for a while on sheer low cunning and lack of any scruples as someone’s hatchet man. But there’s no way Kamala would have survived her first purge. AOC doesn’t even rise to the level of a useful idiot. Etc.

    Liked by 1 person

  23. Re: rent control. Even lefty economists think it is bad. It may be one of the few areas where pretty much every economist agrees

    Assar Lindbeck, the late left-wing Swedish economist who for many years chaired the committee that awarded the Nobel Prize, famously said: “In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city–except for bombing.”

    Liked by 1 person

  25. <i>They believe that there’s safety and MORALITY in numbers that the greater number is always right and to an extent — remember, levitating the mint seemed rational to them — that reality is determined by consensus.</i>

    The interesting thing is I have an RPG centered on that idea: that reality is in the eye of the beholder and consensus reality will actively punish those who refuse to accept it.

    And in 4 editions of that game more thought was put into possible ramifications of that idea than most people who spout it (although I suspect one or two of the creators are in that group although I do not think the one I have met in person is one of them).

    Even when in the 20th anniversary edition (which I did buy the extra special faux leather covered version) they got very present day on things like race and gender when they did cultural appropriation cutting back how much the “bad guy” western mages (scientists…science is magic that builds the consensus…no, trust me, the idea of how that would work hold water given the base assumptions) had converted reality world wide it was set as a “how much influence the generic western mindset has on locals in non-western countries” which makes sense.

    When political movements make sense in following through on their ideas than a pretentious RPG does those movements have a problem.

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    1. In Poul Anderson’s Operation Chaos, spells work better when spoken in an exotic language, so at one point Steve Matuchek comments this is why so many African students come to study in the US – to learn American slang.

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        1. It was a throw-away line to explain his Pig-Latin spell.

          Just like the polarized contact lenses that let people with the Evil Eye live normal lives, it would be dumb luck to remember it.

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  26. “They are commies, sure. But not the cunning commies of the cold war. No. These are 40 something theater kiddies, who have been doing all the right things according to what they were told is right.”

    The old hippies just fouled their nests. The new ones are convinced they have to burn their nests, and ours too, because of course great things lie under the ashes, if we just all believe.

    Because, you see, their belief is the Logos …

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  27. One particular thing has bothered me about the whole miserable years-long tale, and it rather exposes my own foibles as a reader/writer. There has been an incredible, compelling story going on, of a power struggle with the very highest of stakes. It’s had corruption and lies and manipulation, kingmakers and backstabbers and powers behind the throne. It’s been a political thriller on a par with, or even better than, I, Claudius or Game of Thrones or House of Cards*.

    *Do I prefer the British original to the American remake? You might very well think so; I couldn’t possibly comment.

    And we haven’t gotten to see it.

    It’s all been hidden from us, because it’s all been intended to hoodwink and to rule over us. We’ve gotten glimpses and flashes and rumors, most of them dismissed or covered up by the outlets whose proclaimed mission is to inform us. Is Ron Klain really running the show? Or Jill Biden? Or Barack Obama? We don’t know, and even asking the question got you tarred (until very recently) as some kind of lunatic.

    We’ve been seeing more lately, as one of the curtains fell away, and there hasn’t been enough popcorn to go around. It still isn’t enough. For the enormous price we paid for this show, we ought to be getting to see very much more.

    Of course, it would have been far better to be spared the show, and the price, altogether.

    Republica restituendae, et, Hamas delenda est.

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    1. CLARIFICATION: When I said we deserved to see more of the underhanded amoral machinations abroad in our country today, this is not what I meant!

      Two inches away from the Second Civil War. It was over three hundred million people more than Donald Trump who dodged a bullet yesterday.

      Republica restituendae.

      Liked by 1 person

    1. Me too, Hurt/Comfort Harry Potter fics is how I get through a depressing day.

      We all have our coping mechanisms.

      Liked by 1 person

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